Incorporation, Colonialism and Labour Supply in Southern Africa (1880-1940). Introduction and Objectives The question to which both the modernization theories in the 60s and the neoliberal politics in the 80s and 90s have not yet given an answer is to understand why the gap between centre and periphery and the stratification and polarization of the social classes, in terms of aggregated data at global level, doesn’t reduce but rather seems to increase. The dominant thought uses to affirm that Africa is marginalised, i.e. that the continent is integrated only partially in the global economy. The purpose of the South African president Thabo Mbeki, expressed in the presentation of NEPAD (New Partnership for African Development) to the heads of state at the G-8 summit in Canada in 2002, consisted of setting up a global “New Deal” for Africa with the aim to enhance the growth of the African GDP to 7% each year. The plan consists of reshaping the interstate relations: “ the advantages of an effectively regulated integration represent the best perspective for a future economic prosperity and for the reduction of poverty... through the role of national authorities and private institutions in driving the globalisation agenda on a path of sustainability,.....if resources will be properly utilised, the economic growth, equitable and sustainable, of the continent as its rapid integration in the world economy could be achieved” (Mbeki, 2001). In my opinion these assumptions are misleading. They represent an a-historical reiteration of a model of development based on comparative advantages that as history showed, in the case of Africa, have been responsible for the polarization between North and South and the increasing socio-economic stratification and deterioration of the latter. A more rapid integration of Africa in the world economy through export-oriented strategies, as requested by the Washington Consensus, has undermined its
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Incorporation, Colonialism and Labour Supply in Southern Africa (1880-1940).
Introduction and Objectives
The question to which both the modernization theories in the 60s and the neoliberal politics in the 80s
and 90s have not yet given an answer is to understand why the gap between centre and periphery and
the stratification and polarization of the social classes, in terms of aggregated data at global level,
doesn’t reduce but rather seems to increase.
The dominant thought uses to affirm that Africa is marginalised, i.e. that the continent is integrated
only partially in the global economy. The purpose of the South African president Thabo Mbeki,
expressed in the presentation of NEPAD (New Partnership for African Development) to the heads of
state at the G-8 summit in Canada in 2002, consisted of setting up a global “New Deal” for Africa with
the aim to enhance the growth of the African GDP to 7% each year. The plan consists of reshaping the
interstate relations:
“ the advantages of an effectively regulated integration represent the best perspective for a future economic
prosperity and for the reduction of poverty... through the role of national authorities and private institutions in
driving the globalisation agenda on a path of sustainability,.....if resources will be properly utilised, the economic
growth, equitable and sustainable, of the continent as its rapid integration in the world economy could be
achieved” (Mbeki, 2001).
In my opinion these assumptions are misleading. They represent an a-historical reiteration of a model
of development based on comparative advantages that as history showed, in the case of Africa, have
been responsible for the polarization between North and South and the increasing socio-economic
stratification and deterioration of the latter. A more rapid integration of Africa in the world economy
through export-oriented strategies, as requested by the Washington Consensus, has undermined its
autonomous capability of development, during the colonialism, the “development project” as well as
along the “globalization project” (McMicheal, 2001). In the last quarter of the 20th century, African
crises have been transformed to what has been called the African tragedy (Leys, 1994: 33-47) : in 1975,
Sub-Saharan per capita GNP stood at 17.6% of the “world” per capita GNP, by 1999 this figure had
fallen to 10.6% (Arrighi, 2002: 5-36).
In addition if we analyse the relation between trans-regional trade and GDP of African countries in the
1990, we notice that the contribution of the trans-regional trade to the GDP of Africa amounts to
45.6%, while only 12.8% in the case of the Europe, 13.2% in North America, 23.7% in Latin America
and 15.2% in Asia (Cordelier, 1997: 23). Thus we realise that Africa is more integrated than any other
region in the capitalist world-economy. What seems here to be important in analytical terms is to
historicize this process, understand the nature of the incorporation and its forms, the economic,
political and social forces that have driven this process and the transformation of the relations of
productions in the pre-capitalist societies. The aim of this work is to analyse in historical perspective
which have been, on one hand, the political and economical dynamics which have driven the process of
integration of Southern Africa in the capitalist world economy and its relative process of colonisation,
and on the other hand, we want to clarify the nature of the process of transformation of the pre-
capitalist societies and of its mode of production.
This approach aims to articulate an analysis of the social, economical and political reality of the
Southern Africa, by contemplating, the development/underdevelopment that the area has experienced
since the forces of expansion of the capitalist world economy interacted with the region not as an aim
in se but to understand the consequences of the impact on local social relations of production and
property relations that pre-existed the process of interaction/collision with the West, conceived as an
economical, political and cultural frontier in continuous expansion as in continuous contradiction
between its parts.
The method I intend to use to pursue these objectives is based : a) on the analysis of the regional
integration of the historical geographies of capitalist development; b) on the role of different agents
(colonial governments and/or enterprises, state-companies, settlers) in shaping the dynamics and the
functioning of the process of accumulation of capital; c) on the issue of labour supply : its importance
or better its preponderance in the process of social production and reproduction of the local
communities as well as its centrality in the process of accumulation of capital, its extraction, its
recruitment, through coercive, legal, political and economical means.
This kind of approach aims to demystify and to repudiate the idea, largely present in the social sciences,
according to which Africa would be a continent without history, immobile, without any autonomous
dynamic of evolution as embedded in the “darkness” and “irrationality” of its traditions. The intention
of the project is to analyse, and if possible to explain, the contradictions of capitalist mode of
production and the consequences of these on pre-capitalist modes of production and in the bosom of
classes and groups that ruled or that were simply subordinated to these.
In this complex and articulate picture our firm idea is that only through a geographically extensive
conceptualisation of the vectors of the regional space of Southern Africa can we come to understand
the interconnections between different areas, between places and people, which have ensured, since
colonialism, that the process of “modernization” has been experienced and enacted in a multiplicity of
ways producing different historical geographies of modernity (Lester, 2003: 1-20).
Because of the vastity of the task and the impossibility to analyse all the micro historical geographies,
we will limit our enquiry to those fundamental and common dynamics that may be relevant in the
region and that represent important factors in the process of social change.
Incorporation of Southern Africa in the Capitalist World-Economy
The majority of Southern African historians agree that the major historical transformation of the area is
understood as the transition from self-subsistent, pre-capitalist African communities to peoples
subordinated by capitalism and colonial/settler political authorities.
The periodization of this process must be traced back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a
period which testifies the great change leading to the construction of colonial regimes dominated by the
settlers.
Different attempts were made by Dutch and Portuguese merchants in the era of the Informal Empire to
colonize Southern Africa, but these activities were circumscribed to the coastal areas.
Thus, despite of almost three centuries of colonial intrusion, Southern Africa remained largely and for
most part of the nineteenth century under the control of its native population.
The extractive nature (piracy and plunder) of the merchant capital and the lack of financial and
political forces didn’t allow a further penetration/transformation.
As we have expressed in the introduction one of our starting points is the existence of a capitalist
world-economy that has extended during the time through the incorporation of areas that were before
located in an external arena. As Wallerstein has written:
“At a certain point both Europe and Africa (or at least large zones of each) came to be incorporated into a single social
system, a capitalist world-economy, whose fundamental dynamic largely controlled the actors located in both sector of one
united arena. It is in the reciprocal linkages of the various regions of the capitalist world-economy that we find the
underlying determinants of social actions at a more local level”. (Wallerstein, 1985: 35)
The main driving-force to the process of incorporation of other areas must be located in the
compression of the margins of profit due to the endless accumulation of capital (value law), in the
process of commodification of the production relations and in the continuous search for spatial fixes. In
fact when new production relations are commodified, i.e. valued in market terms and distributed in
pseudo-market conditions, the capitalist world economy experiences an expansion of the geographical
places included in the international division of the labour. The extension of the world economy is
strictly interlinked with the phases of growth and decline in the economic activity, in particular when
the recession takes place the entrepreneurs have to be more creative reducing the labour costs and the
management costs in relation to fix capital, as well as through relocation and outsourcing.
The incorporation of an area represents first of all the integration of its production processes in the
interdependent network of relational and productive processes that constitute the world market
(Martin and Wallerstein, 1979: 193-207).
The objective of the process of incorporation was to assimilate new external areas, new potential
markets, restructure the productive activities of the incorporated area so that conform to and make
them organically participative of the functioning of the capitalist world economy (Hopkins and
Wallerstein, 1985: 763-779)
This process implied, on one hand, the transformation of the productive sphere in such a way as to
create production activities integrated in the international division of the labour and ,on the other
hand, the alteration in the sphere of the governance so as to structure state institutions that worked as an
integral part of the interstate system.
Indeed neither represents a simple objective, for the transformation of production processes entailed
the adaptation of the norms of management of the land, the relocation of the labour forces, the
metamorphosis of the production relations, and ultimately the alteration of the social forces balances.
Thus the incorporation means to convert the use of local resources (land, labour, subsoil) towards the
production for the world market (Arrighi, 1979: 161-191).
Indeed the process is neither automatic and immediate or linear. In addition it lays not only on the role
of external agents but depends also, on one hand, on the unwillingness/resistance of traditional
political authorities to the transformation of production processes, and on the other hand on the
material existence of the labour forces necessary to feed the process of accumulation of capital. We will
look at the labour supply in the next section now we would like to analyse the combined political and
economic penetration of the continent.
The political resistance to the process of incorporation has been overcome through a combination of
two strategies: a) the foreign military intervention, in virtue of its superior strength, has, generally,
curbed the resistance of the traditional authorities reluctant to the incorporation; b) the political strategy
of Indirect Rule through which the colonial regimes substituted the disinclined political authorities with
cooperant authorities1.
The political and military domination was fuelled by two fundamental events: the Scramble for Africa and
the mineral revolution in Southern Africa (discovery of extensive reefs in the region of Witwatersrand,
which followed the discovery of diamonds fields in Kimberly in 1867).
The dates of these two events are so close that it’s unavoidable to correlate these two phenomena in a
dialectical framework. The Berlin Conference (1884-1885) ratified the partition of Africa between the
main European political powers defining different and exclusive areas of economic influence (Ratcliffe,
1981: 3-31) . This was a period of compressions of the margins of the accumulation of profits
engendered by an increasing inter-capitalist competition. The years between the 1848-1875, a period
known as the Age of Capital (Hobsbawm, 1976) , created vast sums of money that looked for a
profitable investment.
As Braudel has argued, all the major expansion in the sphere of trade and production of the capitalist
world economy have engendered an over-accumulation of capital that was not able to find any
profitability in the ordinary channels of investment; thus the cores of the world economy orientated, in
order to redefine a new control over the world processes of accumulation, their energy towards a
specialization in financial intermediation (Braudel, 1981). The surplus engendered was soon used up in
two ways: a) to finance military expenditures that led to military interventions all over the world,
including Africa; b) to create the credit needed to fuel the expansion of the chartered companies in
Africa that were enlisted in the stock exchange of London. In the later part of the century, the financial
ambitions of capitalists combined with the crosscurrents of imperial expansion produced a stream of
.
concession-hunters. The British South African Company, for example, gained full and exclusive access
to the mineral resources of Northern (Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and the right to
exploit them in whatever way it deemed necessary, receiving a royal charter in 1889; the Sena Sugar
Estate (British capital), later substituted by the Mozambique Company, was granted a fifty years charter
in 1897 and given full sovereign right over the resources and population of the Mozambican provinces
of Sofala and Manica; The Nyassa Company (south African mining capital) was conceded a twenty-five
years charter over the provinces of Nyassa and Cabo Delgado (Munslow, 1983: 28-30). A generation of
military conquest by both settlers and colonial powers (Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium) had
established political boundaries throughout the area. The Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) represents the
apex of the increasing inter competition in the area for the exploitation of mineral resources between
the British imperialism and the Boers Republics and the African kingdoms; the Matabele war in 1893
broke the resistance of Ndebele; the defeat of Gungunjana and the Gaza state in 1895, Portugal could
claim “ownership” of the Mozambican labour force and extend its political authority on the most part
of the country. These military interventions in the area not only opened access to the resources of the
area, but also facilitated control over labour. At the beginning of the century the map of Southern
Africa was the outcome of a generation of rapid European conquest. Briefly outlined there existed the
Union of South Africa (created by British authorities, including the former colonies of the Cape and
Natal along with the Afrikaner Republics of the interior, and the African Kingdom that were integrated
in it); the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola; the British colonies of Southern Rhodesia
to which self-governing status was granted in 1924, Nyasaland (present day Malawi), Northern
Rhodesia (under direct Crown control, and known as Zambia); the British high Commissioner
Territories of Bechuanaland (Botswana today), Basutoland (known today as Lesotho) and Swaziland;
South West Africa (today known as Namibia) previously a German colony from 1892 until the end of
the First World war when the League of Nations gave a mandate to South Africa to administer the
territory after the Versailles Treaty (Martin, 1987: 849-900).
The previous African political structures, ranging from highly centralized states/kingdoms (Zulu,
Ndebele, Pedi, Kololo) to acephalous communities (Khoi-Khoi, San), that occupied the region were
defeated. The removal over economic and redistributive relations was only one aspects of the process.
Indeed the transition in the nature of the political power was not simply the diminution of the power of
African political authorities and the rise of settler political power but it included the
creation/imposition of political bodies that served to assure the necessary integration of the area in the
global division of labour and to assure a mode of regulation of the social relations of production
functional to the process of primitive accumulation.
This metamorphosis of the African political sphere was matched by a similar process of transformation
in the productive realm. The new production processes that filled up the regional space altered
completely the economical geography of the region, pivoted on the pole of the Transvaal mines. Most
notable of the new production processes were the large-scale enterprises that stretched from diamond
mining at Kimberley2, to the collieries of Natal, to the gold mines of Witwatersrand and Rhodesia and
onward on the Katangan Copperbelt. Settler farms and estate, especially in South Africa and Rhodesia,
and Portuguese latifundia, similarly spread throughout the region, led to new production relations based,
upon export oriented production. However the extension of political boundaries and the spread of
companies that detained a sovereign control over the Southern Africa territories do not necessarily and
automatically represent an expansion of the real political power. Indeed, the development of a process
of primitive accumulation depended strictly upon the existence of a constant and stable labour supply
and of a mode of regulation of the new social relations of production established through coercive
means.
Production Processes and Labour Supply
Across the Southern Africa region new production processes had been implanted. The most important
development took place in the mining, where the discovery and exploitation of the diamonds area in
Kimberley and of the vast gold reefs in the Rand, were soon followed by the opening up of new mines
throughout the region (Copperbelt and Katanga). The development of the mining industry made
necessary the construction of an articulated network of infrastructures, roads, railways and ports that
served the needs of the new production processes and linked the most part of Southern Africa. It
spurred the commercialization of the agriculture for the need of huge amount of labourers of the
mining industry to be fed. In reality the regional space became an inter-territoriality unit, an expanded
ensemble of means of production subject to a singular policy making centre which controls
establishments situated in several different national territories. According to F.Perroux:
“The organization of a nation on a one-by-one and separate basis goes against the technical and economical requirements,
which are the direct and unavoidable consequence of the techniques used in the industry in the twentieth century. The
conflict between the exigencies of the political and territorial organization of the social life people and the exigencies of the
multi-national administration of the large scale industry is a continuing reality”. (Perroux, 1959, in Arrighi and Saul,
1973: 105-106).
This assumption is relevant to our analysis in virtue of the fact that it underlines the nature of the
regional space, as a space crossed by contradictions and cooperations, conflicts and agreements, not as
a smooth space. Notwithstanding many differences between the mines in terms of location, grade,
quantity, depth of the mined ore and the proximity to the labour supply, all of them faced the same
problems. They operated in a regional economic system dominated by large, more profitable and more
powerful companies, in addition high-scale production of gold needed access to capital and the relative
necessity of a constant large supply of cheap labour.
The first few years of the mining have been known as the years of speculative capitalism (1890-1904).
In Africa the scarce factor was not land, which was abundant, but labour, thus the companies because
of the scarcity of labour, that didn’t allow the process of primitive accumulation, retired themselves in
the speculative sphere of the alienation of land and the exaction of tributes. As a short term solution to
the shortage of labour, the companies started with the imposition of rents and other payments through
the setting up of semi-feudal relations on the African tenants, in order to facilitate labour recruiting and
to boost its own revenue. In 1902, the 69% of the total revenue of the BSA Company relied on this
source (Burawoy, 1985: 13). At the beginning of the colonisation African tenants were allowed to stay
on expropriated land because the dominant capitalist system relied upon the African supply of
produces and any reduction would have seriously hit the mining interest.
The process of the accumulation of capital in the region, however, was circumscribed by the unique
costs structure of the mining industry and by the competition between mine companies and between
different employers (agricultural farmers and mine owners) in the different sectors.
The fundamental conditions of the accumulation of capital in the mining industry, i.e. the necessity of
access to the market of capitals, advanced industrial technology to drill ore in the deep-level reefs and
huge labour demand, engendered a progressive concentration of the ownership of the mines and a
centralization of the productive activities. The joint stock companies acted as catalysts of exceeding
capital investments and multipliers of the nominal value stimulating the transnationalization of capital.
Between 1887 and 1913 the flow of capital that sustained the South African gold mining from abroad
(Britain and Europe), in order to guarantee the demand of liquidity of the international system (gold
currency), amounted to £125 million and only less then 15% of that investments were South African
owned (Legassick, in Harris, 1975: 260)
However the low average grade of the gold (half that mined in Western Australia) and an international
fixed price for gold represented structural constraints undermined the profitability of the mining
business. The existence of the gold-standard before the 1914, pivoted on the role of the sterling, the
price of sell of the gold was fixed, so the changes in the relative value of the gold in relation to other
commodities determined a reduction in the purchasing power of the proceeds of the gold production,
although it guaranteed that the output could be maximised indefinitely without jeopardizing profits
(Richardson, Van Helten, in Marks, Rathbone, 1985: 77-98). The immediate consequence of the relative
immobility of the price of the gold for the mine companies was the impossibility to discharge the
increasing inflation of the factors of production (more technology as deep-level mining increased and
more skills) on the consumer.
As the mining companies could not control critical elements in the gold price structure they were
pushed to solve this contradiction stressing on the labour area as a crucial area to minimize the costs.
Same attempts were made to reduce the shortage of labour by importing indentured labour from
southern China. Although by the turn of the century thousands of Africans were working on the
Southern African mines, between the 1903 and 1905 the South African Native Affairs Commission
estimated a shortage of 300.000 labourers each year to match the necessary growth of the production
forces and affirmed further that “natives looked for a wage employment only as a mere supplement to
their subsistence means” (Wallerstein, Martin, Dickinson, 1982: 443). This meant that the strategy of
the companies of minimisation of the costs through the maximization of ultra-cheap labour met two
fundamental hindrances: the shortage of non-white labour supply and the economic African
independence.
The labour shortages internal to South Africa and in the region have been portrayed as
the outcome of the “deficiencies” of the “traditional” or pre-capitalist economies to adapt themselves
to the growth of the opportunities of the market economy, retained “alien” and “unfamiliar” by the
Africans tenants.
Both the pioneering works of C. Bundy and G. Arrighi respectively concerning the South African and
Rhodesia peasantries in a historical perspective purpose a different explanation of the problem.
According to their arguments there was a substantial more positive response of the African peasants to
the opportunities the market economy than it is usually estimated and that an adapted, “flexible” form
of the traditional subsistence method was providing viable alternatives for African to wage
employment.
In the pre-colonial societies of the Southern Africa the access to land was regulated by kinship or tribal
relations, the land could not be commercialized (sold and valued in market terms) and the producers
drawn the most part of their means of subsistence from the “collective” ownership of the access to the
land. However we must not describe these pre-capitalist societies as equalitarian, indeed there existed
poor households that depended on the patronage of other more powerful, the men exerted the social
control of the women, whereas the effects of the inequalities were mitigated or contained through
mechanisms of kinship, redistribution and reciprocity (Polany, 2001).
For the lack of pressures of the population on the land and the rudimentary technology, the use of the
land was extensive and the security of the subsistence could be guaranteed.
In addition the tendency in the pre-capitalist societies to allocate the surplus of the production toward
immediate consumption and un-productive investments sustained and strengthened the social cohesion
and preserved the security afforded by the traditional system.
However the prolonged period of sustained demand of the African produce, engendered by the South
African and Rhodesian mines as well as by the Natal sugar plantations and Mozambique, and the
participation in the money economy that this inevitably entailed, made this interaction necessary. The
model of absorption of the surplus in the peasant society included, as a result of this interaction, new
patterns of resources allocation towards consumption of goods as agricultural implements, coffee,
sugar, clothes, paraffin etc.
Furthermore the initial success of the participation of Africans in the money economy raised the
amount of the “subsistence wage” set up by the traditional mechanism and enhanced the wage that
should be paid to attract African workers to the mines. Thus the African involvement in the labour
market was discouraged and the shortage of labour for the mines and for large-scale settler farms
increased.
This ulterior contradiction between the tendency to keep down the wages and the unwillingness of the
African labourers to work in the mines increased the necessity of compulsory, legal and coercive forms
of involvement of Africans in the wage employment.
The fact that scant labour was sold on the market was due to the fact that the effort-price for the
participation in the produce market in order to earn money was lower than the wage employment in the
mines. African resistance, in fact, lied on the diffused opinion between the Africans that produce
As a share-cropper, or labourer, was economically preferable to works, hard and for long period of time,
with wages below the minimum standard in the emerging capitalist enterprises. The retention of the
labour force in the pre-capitalist societies, especially in the rural areas, made necessary for the mines
company to search out potential labour force in the fringes of the region. To avoid competition and
reduce costs, the companies tried to impose a policy of collaborative monopsony to control the labour
market, thus the South African and Rhodesian companies constituted, through the Chambers of the
Mines, respectively the WENELA (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association) and RNLB (Rhodesian
Native Labour Bureau). The former, constituted in 1896 by the Chamber of Mines, was to be the sole
recruiter outside the border of Southern Africa – for East Africa, including the Portuguese colonies and
British Commissioner. The articulation of the system of recruitment was extremely widespread, “its
fingers point into Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, far into Tanganyika, into all the High Commissioner
territories; Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland” ( Davidson, 1952 in Magubane, 1979: 80). The
RNLB recruited legally in Nyasaland between 1903-1910, illegally in Mozambique from 1903 and legally
from 1914 within the Tete province and legally on the basis of a quasi monopoly in Southern and
Northern Rhodesia (Van Onselen, 1976: 110-11).
However both this agencies of recruitment did not solve the problem of shortage of labour.
Hindrances were posed on them by the fact that they operated in the framework of a regional
economic system. So, especially for the Rhodesian mines, that were not in the conditions to compete
with the salaries paid in the Witwatersrand, because of the different location of the reefs (deeper and
more scattered) and because of different sizes of the investment and resources, it was difficult to
prevent the flow of migrants labourers from going to South attracted by the centripetal forces of the
Transvaal mines and their relatively higher wages. So besides this search out for external labour supply,
a more coercive native policy and a more direct relation between the politics of production and the state
politics were needed. A policy that as we could see in the next section aims at separating the African
peasantries from their means of subsistence.
States Politics, Migrant Labour and Social Reproduction.
The process of accumulation of capital was severely curtailed by the lack of labour force and by the
competing interests that pervaded the regional economic system. The requirements for reducing costs
of labour tended towards an opposite logic: reductions in African wages made the mines less attractive.
This contradiction emerged soon in the form of pressures on the colonial states by the social
formations that constituted the base of the colonial regimes. Although there were many contradictions
between large scale international capitalism (which controlled railways and transport facilities, the bulk
of gold production and coal mining) and the emerging white rural bourgeoisie (national in character),
for example in the pattern of investments (the latter preferred increased investments in the
infrastructures, while the former had a predilection for restrictive policies), they also shared common
interests. Both needed availability of a stable labour force. Both needed the reduction of the economic
African peasantry autonomy.
The means used to mobilize labour force were numerous, articulated and coordinated: the imposition
of taxes to force the sales of the means of subsistence and translate the discretionary character of the
African participation in the money economy in a necessary one, the restriction of the access to the land,
forms of indebtedness that to be extinguished required a seasonal participation of Africans to the mines
or plantations or in the settlers estates works, forms of forced labour or chibaro as in the Portuguese
colonies and finally legal discriminations in the allocations of provisions and grants in the form of
implements, seeds and agrarian assistance only for the white capitalist agriculture. This in turn would
have meant the disruption of the competitive position of African peasantry as regards to the emerging
white capitalist agriculture. A plethora of draconian state regulations were imposed on African
peasantries throughout all the regional system in the early twentieth century. In South Africa, the Land
Act of 1913, forbade the purchase or the rent of land for African outside the “scheduled African areas”
(native reserves and African locations that amounted to the 7.3% of the national land)3 and also
abolished the farming-on-the-half system that allowed the Africans who owned their own ploughs and
oxen to cultivate and live on the white settler property in exchange for half the harvest. In 1922 the
Native Taxation and Development Act forced all the Africans males between sixteen and sixty-five to pay a
poll tax and a hut tax. The Native Urban Areas Act created separate locations for Africans (native
reserves) and declared that Africans could not be granted the same place in urban life and industry as
whites. The Mines and Work Act in 1911 reserved jobs only for white workers, while the Industrial
Conciliation Act in 1926 explicitly excluded the Africans from the practices of collective bargain (Bundy,
1991 in Gentili, 1993: 49-80). These regulations reflected a racial division of the labour in the mines as
in the urban areas. Through this legal frame-work the reserves were translated in a base of recruitment,
a huge reserve of labour as the result of a deliberate policy of deprivation and uprooting as a halt to the
development of African communities and at the same time extract and channel labourers to the urban
areas and mines.
This pattern of control of the labour-force in South Africa was soon extended throughout the region.
The Land Apportionment Act (1931) in Rhodesia, the Decree of August (1911) and January (1912) in
Katanga, the 1897 Regulamento in Portuguese colonies which prescribed compulsory labour service and
the Regulations of 1906-1907 in South-West Africa designed to restrict the peasants access to land and
cattle in order to guarantee a steady labour supply. The policy of centralization of arable land, that
represented one part of the overall strategy of destruction of the African political economies, increased
the push of the Africans towards the reserves. The colonial support of the competitive position of the
white capitalist agriculture took the form of preferential grants and subsidies of seeds, plants, technical
innovation, new crops, boring water and financial assistance at subsidized interest rates. The colonial
administrations instituted a discriminatory price policy for the sale of African produce which
discouraged the participation in the produce market because it increased the effort-price, in terms of
labour-time, that African would have had to bear4. This process conducted, by one hand, to an
increased specialization and a more articulated division of the labour in the white capitalist agriculture;
on the other hand it undermined the African self-sufficient political and economical organization. The
Africans population pressure on eroded and less fertile lands increased and contributed to the soil
erosion because it was subjected to intense and not-rotatory practices of cultivation. The discretionary
and flexible character of the African peasantry participation to the wage employment, which recurred in
times of droughts or crisis in the seasonal harvest, was transformed into a structural and necessary
condition. Furthermore increased tax pressures imposed by colonial administrations in South Africa,
Rhodesia and Mozambique, that had the aim to improve labour-force locally in order to bridge the gap
between the long-term demand of labour necessary to develop long-term investments in agriculture as
in industry, tended to push a significant number of peasants within the circuit of the regional economic
system. The trans-national flow of migrant labourers was indeed fuelled by inter governmental
agreements around the issue of labour recruitment aimed at extending the regional inter-connections
that in turn strengthened the stability of the poles of accumulation in South Africa and Rhodesia.
The politics adopted in different places at different time with regard to the shove of migrant labourers
in the regional economic system were determined by the different functions that different areas/people
represented in the overall picture of the Southern African connection. Although the management of the
labour force to the mines should remain in the mine companies hands, the South African and
Portuguese colonial administration signed a Modus Vivendi (1901), that later led to the Mozambique
Conventions (1909 -1928) (First, 1982: 217-222), to maintain a stable flow of migrant labour. Portuguese
authorities used their control on labour supply to extract good deal with the South African government.
It imposed on the Mozambican peasantry a period of forced labour, chibaro.
Its threat represented an important inducement to work to the mines, as signing a contract to work to
the mines represented a legal exemption from chibaro. The Portuguese authorities realised surplus value
receiving a fixed sum for every recruiter, paid in gold directly to Lisbon, and a wage’s portion of every
worker was placed in a bank in Mozambique and given to the worker at his return in the Portuguese
colonies, in addition the 47,5% of the seaborne import traffic to the Johannesburg areas would pass
through the port of Lourenco Marques (Magubane, 1979: 79-80). The Mozambique after this process
became one of the largest reservoirs of mineworkers: in 1906 it furnished the 70% of the total labour
force of the South African mines (Cohen, 1987: 89). Even though the policies adopted in different
places at different periods hit people in different ways, according to the dominant requirements of the
leading sectors of the region economy, the migrant labour was the common feature of the regional
economic system.
It is difficult to find an area that has not been touched by the migrant system labour: Mozambique,
Lesotho, Botswana and Transkey have been deeply affected by labour requirements on regional scale
(mainly towards South Africa); Northern Rhodesia and later Nyasaland were transformed by the
conjunct actions of various governments and private agencies in reservoirs of cheap labour (mainly
towards the Rhodesian mines).
The supreme objective of the colonial states was thus to secure the development of a capitalist mode of
production without destroy the “traditional” modes of production but incorporating its members as
single labourers. As Rosa Luxembourg argued continued expansion of capitalism rested on the
incorporation of pre-capitalist modes of production, which were by no means automatically dissolved
by the advance of capitalism (Luxembourg and Buckharin, 1972). The migrant labourers never lost
contact with their area of origins, where they came back in periods of rest, refreshment, injury or when
they were not any more able to work. The result was a process of semi-proletarianization in which the
capitalists had to afford only the cost of maintenance of labour force (one person living wage in town
or in a compound ) while they outsourced the costs of renewal of the labour force on the rural household
(on the labour of the women). It means that capitalists could pay wages under the minimum standard in
virtue of the security of the role of the rural household in the social reproduction of the labour force.
As the authors of Roots of Rural Poverty put it:
“ elements of the pre-capitalist system were deliberately permitted to survive under capitalism... between the first decade of
twentieth century in the south and the third decade in the north of Southern Africa, there were created variations of the
“dual economy” which kept African families split but constantly moving between rural and urban “reserves” or settler
estates”. (Palmer and Parson, 1983: 4-5)
The set of arrangements (legal and political) in the single colonial states as well as between them
separated the production loci from that of the social reproduction in which the logic of the migrant
system assured the connection between “rural” and “urban” in a joint social structure.
The worker-peasant assured the connection between these two spheres and represented a way to make
up to the growing inability of the rural households to sustain their social reproduction in consideration
of the lost ability to reproduce their subsistence economy. In most social formations the processes of
peasantization and proletarianization were strictly interconnected and combined “wage and hoe” for
the reproduction of labour and of the household.
Once lost their ability to reproduce their subsistence economy, the African peasants could never again
be self-sufficient. Their dependence from the wage employment was structural. After the use of
military, legal and political means, the labour supply for the mines and capitalitist farms, which was
inverse function of the economic African independence, was secured.
Once the capitalist agriculture had overcame the initial competitive difficulties in the produce market
thanks to the extra-economic interventions, the “market forces” could operate “freely” and guarantee
the labour supply, at a wage rate below what chibaro system had provided.
Conclusions
The development of the capitalist system was strictly intertwined with the racial discrimination. The
economic, political and ideological motives that have structured the capitalist relations could not be
separate. The ideological of racism is expanded and fed by the necessity of the capitalist logic to expand
itself and to exploit areas that are subsumed to its rules.
The labour market must not be considered as the place were buyers and sellers of labour power meet as
a result of the spontaneous activity of the market “laws”, but must be conceived as a place where the
national and international political and economic conflicts take place, it’s a complex of political
institutions for producing and distributing political and material resources, not a natural phenomenon.
The system legalized a racial division of labour in the mines and urban areas as well as a sexual division
of the labour in the rural household. The dependence of the areas that have been engaged in the
regional migrant labour system weakened the social and political structure of the local economies. This
set of forces severely altered the economical geography of the region making the space very instable
and restructured and stratified the social structure that sustained this process. How these transnational
processes will influence the class structure of the national African independencies as well as the social
reproduction of the rural households is a question that we leave to others.
Notes
1 This was evident especially in the British Protectorates and Natal where headmen and chiefs were appointed by the colonial administrations in order to diminish the administrations costs of the colonies and to have more subtle modes of penetration of the local communities. 2 Between these large companies the Rhodes Consolidated Gold Field of South Africa LTD, after a period of complex financial manoeuvring and of centralization of capital, came to control a good part in the deep level mining industry of gold. 3 This percentage was increased by the Natives Land and Trust Act in 1936 with the aim to solve the problem of the incapability of the African reserves to provide for the satisfaction of their minimum requirements. 4 In particular, the marketing organizations created by the Rhodesian colonial government as the Maize Central Act (1931) had the aim to create a two system price that undermined the African participation in the market produce. Other state regulations were the Tobacco Marketing Act or the Sugar Industry Board in the years 1930-1940.
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